Emma Bjurström / Someone else is breathing, 09.05 – 07.06.2025, Opening Thursday, 08.05 at 5 – 7 PM, Belenius
While working on her new paintings, Bjurström has asked herself whether a work in a series of paintings can push aside the one that came before it, replacing the previous work. Is it born out of the same thought processes, or is the new work merely an iteration of familiar ideas?
She has felt an urge and a longing to change her previous visual language — where almost recognizable objects drift in abstract surroundings, almost perceived by the viewer, only to dissolve again. Bjurström has often depicted pieces of fabric in her paintings as a way to ground her images in reality. “Something to hold on to,” she says. Throughout art history, fabric has appeared in painting again and again. It can represent the human condition, cultural identity, and the passage of time.
– Lovie Peoples, 2025 (excerpt from exhibition text).
Emma Bjurström (b. 1986 in Uppsala, Sweden) lives and works in Virrestad, Sweden.
Bjurström graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2014 and has since focused primarily on painting as her medium of choice. Her work explores how artifacts and symbols from the past can be reinterpreted, re-evaluated, and brought back to life. What once was is transformed. Through meticulous studies and enlarged depictions of historical objects, Bjurström breathes new energy into the past while highlighting the evolving distance between different eras. Objects from history acquire renewed meaning in a new millennium. Nineteenth-century painting serves as a key reference point in her practice, and she cites artists such as Anders Zorn, John Singer Sargent, and Édouard Manet as major influences.
Her solo exhibitions include In Three Acts (2023) at Lamb Art Gallery, London; Timber and Stone (2021) and Absentminded Deformation (2018), both at Belenius in Stockholm, and at Överkloster (2017) in Skåne, Sweden.
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